The (not-so) secret Air Force One trip to Afghanistan

Hiding a large aircraft is not easy. If such plane is the world’s most famous Boeing 747, the undertaking will be even more challenging.

As you already know by now, President Obama arrived in Afghanistan on May 1 at 10.30PM (Kabul time), to sign a strategic-partnership agreement with President Hamid Karzai. His “surprise” visit took place on the first anniversary of the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan.

Image credit: AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

The VC-25 (military designation for the presidential Jumbo) landed in the darkness of the night at Bagram airfield, one of the largest U.S. military bases in Afghanistan.

Even if we don’t have any specific detail about the Air Force One flight, we can assume the aircraft used the same precautions used on visits to other dangerous spots around the world (as reported by accompanying journalists and military analysts):

steep descent and “aggressive turns” during the last part of the flight to prevent a predictable flight path that could ease targeting attempts

fake radio callsign since take off, in order to mask the flight to all the Air Traffic Control (ATC) agencies encountered enroute

use of two almost identical VC-25s

accompanying /preceding cargo planes to sequence arrivals in such a way to mask the AF1 between airlifters

Fortunately, deceiving terrorists or insurgents is usually easier than fool an aviation geek into believing that the one he has just heard on a radio is not the Air Force One crossing the ocean enroute to a secret place, but a routine ferry flight.

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